Governing and Commoning Activities around Urban Food Commons

Reframing both the city as commons and food as commons changes how we think about urban food governance. Food is currently governed as both a privately owned and traded commodity and a public good that should be healthy, safe, and accessible to everyone. This public/private or state/market binary is insufficient for governing the diverse ways in which people provision food; it can also stand in the way of achieving more just and sustainable food systems. The commoning activities of community food initiatives, activists, policymakers, growers, sharers, and eaters – have the potential to create, share, and care for urban food commons as collective public goods. Yet, these commoning activities are rarely examined as urban food governance practices. At the same time, commoners often lack access to the legal and policy tools that govern the urban food commons they are creating and caring for. This chapter explores how community gardens have used technology, mapping, and community organizing to make urban food governance visible and accessible to urban food commoners. In doing so, they have transformed legal and zoning tools around land use, land trusts, and the public trust doctrine into tools for commoning.